Home>News>Leading Home Furnishing Specialist Retailer Selects Kirona’s Field Service Management Software to Mobilise Aftercare Team

Leading Home Furnishing Specialist Retailer Selects Kirona’s Field Service Management Software to Mobilise Aftercare Team

16th February 2018

By Laraine Geddes

One of the UK’s best-known providers of sofas and carpets has selected field service management specialist Kirona to implement a product suite that will optimise the mobilisation of its aftercare team.

Established in the 1890’s in the North East of England, the company employs a total of 2,000 people including a team of 60 aftercare technicians nationwide. The team is responsible for providing customer home visits to assess product quality and arrange repairs and replacements as needed; as such, it plays an essential role in keeping the retailer’s commitment to providing service excellence, value and quality through care for their customers.

Kirona’s field service management product suite will enable the company to move away from inefficient paper-based processes for managing their technicians. Jobs can be assigned to technicians according to the location and skill set of staff, so if a particular task is unexpectedly time-consuming, there is no knock-on effect to the aftercare team’s overall efficiency. The aftercare team can also take photos on individual jobs and share these with centralised staff in real-time. They will also be able to create follow-on jobs whilst in the customer’s home.

The retailer is deploying Kirona’s full suite of field service management and data analytics software including Dynamic Resource Scheduler, to improve the productivity of field workers by dynamically assigning and managing both planned and reactive jobs; Job Manager for managing information flows between field-based and centralised workers; and InfoSuite, an analytics platform that generates real-time and long-term insight into the performance of field operatives. This comprehensive software suite was chosen to integrate directly with the existing back-office system, Microsoft NAVision, and to provide a single, seamless platform for optimising the company’s constantly-moving aftercare operation.

Neil Harvey, CTO at Kirona stated: “There’s a huge amount of information-sharing involved in running an effective aftercare operation, from gathering data in the field on particular faults or queries, to providing instructions on next steps from the central office. Our suite of solutions will enable the retailer to dramatically speed up and streamline those processes, not only enhancing individual staff members’ day-to-day work, but also generating brand-new, actionable insights into the aftercare operation as a whole.”